Is friendi the only one? I want to move and try getting other people off of fb that are sick of its bullshit, but I need to make sure the alternative is a good one and we dont all have to hop around 5 times to get to a good one…
Keep in mind 98% of them are tech illiterate.
I have some IRL friends there, but not many. Most of them are people I met through the fediverse. I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “Without the network effect of real people” though?
The network effect is the phenomenon of “all of my friends are on Facebook, I better join Facebook,” or “all my follows are moving to Bluesky, I better move to Bluesky”.
Here is how Cory Doctorow explains it:
I think I get it (I hope)? I’ve had a rough couple days sleep and amn’t firing on all cylinders, apologies xD
From the personal side: I don’t really notice it much, because I’ve never really used social media to keep up with people. Facebook was the one I had the most IRL connections on, and I only used it to talk to 5 or 6 people, never for the social media features. It is harder to keep myself on Friendica, and not let it sit idle though. Admittedly it may well just turn into mostly me auto-posting from my blog’s RSS feed, and checking replies occasionally at some point, but I do still check it pretty regularly.
Getting people to switch: I gave up on that before I even started, especially with Friendica. I could probably convince one of my friends to join Lemmy since it’s pretty easy to say “Search lemmyverse.net, copy the community name, paste it” than however you’re supposed to find people on low-pop traditional activity pub styled servers. Plus I am the techiest person I know by a long shot, and while you don’t need to be techie to be on fedi… A lot of us are, so it’s hard to find people who aren’t talking about it as most of what they post.
From the platform’s perspective: Honestly it’s getting better on the whole. It’s not that different to any other apub server, except in that it has more protocols built in (apub, zot, dfrn, and diaspora, plus you can directly follow RSS feeds if you want), and there are a lot of connectors to socials like Tumblr, and even Facebook from what I saw. There’s people here! It’s just convincing people that’s hard.
Sorry if this didn’t actually answer the question, I did my best with a very soupy brain xD Feel free to ask any questions though!